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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Disconnected Computers are still at Risk for Cyberthreats

Are we really aware of the cyberthreats
faced with our computers? Don’t click on the bothersome floating
advertisement, never open mail from suspicious senders, don’t trust your
friends sending you a message containing just a link.

Being tricked into installing malware on your own computer is just a
click away. You think you need a new version of Flash because your
computer tells you so. So you click, install, then realize something is
funny about the download process.

What do you do then? Frantically turn your computer off, hoping you
just stopped what ever invasion your computer is experiencing? If your
computer is infected with a virus or malware, disconnecting it from the
Internet is the first step of security you should take. But is it
enough?

German computer scientists have come up
with a prototype for building “covert channels” between computers using
the machines’ speakers and microphones. This potentially defeats
high-security measures that rely on the “air gap” between computers.

The air gap is a network security measure
that ensures a secure computer network is physically isolated from
unsecured networks. Sometimes the air gap is not completely literal,
and dedicated cryptographic devices can tunnel packets over questionable
networks while avoiding pack rate or size variation.

Dan Goodin from Ars Technica explains:

“The proof-of-concept software — or malicious trojans
that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods — could prove
especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that
routinely place an ‘air gap’ between computers and the outside world.
Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of
standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and
other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The
software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an
acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that
repeat the audio signals.”

Research has shown that computers which were unplugged from networks
and had their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed, were infected with
malware that used high-frequency transmissions.
Hackers are “jumping the air gap” and worrying even military officials.

“If you take a cybernetic view of what’s happening [in
the Navy], right now our approach is unplug it or don’t use a thumb
drive,” retired Navy Capt. Mark Hagerott, a cybersecurity professor at
the U.S. Naval Academy, said at a recent defense conference. But if
hackers “are able to jump the air gap, we are talking about fleets
coming to a stop.” – Geoffrey Ingerson of Business Insider

“Acoustical networking as a covert communication
technology is a considerable threat to computer security,” the
scientists wrote in their paper. However, they said such audio snooping
could be prevented using “a software-deﬁned lowpass ﬁlter” or a
“detection guard” that analyzes audio to identify hidden messages. –
Hanspach and Goetz, German scientists

System devices designate security levels as low side (unclassified)
and high side (classified). I’m sure the military has much more
interesting information in their computers, but just the thought that
nothing can stop computer invasion is scary.